Everyone Must Breathe
by winter machine
Summary: "In a way Addison's always been an intruder into this family.  She's not the wife.  She's borne none of his children.  There's no word for what she is."  Sam's behavior is explained and consequences are felt.
1. BEFORE

_A story in two parts and a bit of a departure. (I'm still working on my stories-in-progress, and will update soon.) Until then:_

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><p><strong>I. Before<strong>

There's no way around it. That's what Amelia says when she looks at slides of the mass and it's what Derek confirms. He flies out to L.A. and embraces her with ceremonial solemnity: that's how she knows it's bad.

"There can be apparent changes in personality with this type of tumor," Derek says carefully. "Sometimes quite striking ones." He leaves the question unasked, and she doesn't answer it, grateful for the small kindnesses people offer when they know you're embarking on something like widowhood.

There's no way around her guilt, either.

They're not married, of course. They're not even living together. Up until the diagnosis she wasn't even sure if they would make it. But a death sentence puts a damper on a breakup like nothing she's ever felt. Time slows down when there's so little of it left.

But it's fast.

It's as if he was waiting for the diagnosis; once it's been confirmed, the deterioration is speedy and brutal.

At first he always recognizes her. She curls up next to him when he reaches for her - there are no bars on the beds in hospice; they know it may be the last chance for tactile contact.

He's confused - just sometimes, at first. Then more and more. He asks for Naomi. She's there. Then he stops recognizing her too.

He's most alive when Olivia visits. She's a bold and smiling child who burrows, pudgy and dimpled, into her grandfather's chest. He cuddles her against him, smells her hair. He calls her Maya.

He calls Maya "nurse."

When they huddle in the family room Maya cries enough for all of them.

"I wish he recognized me," she sobs. "I want him to remember."

"He does recognize you," Violet says gently. She sits with them a lot. "In his way, he does. He knows he loves you. A part of him can remember nurturing you. And he sees Olivia and remembers holding you when you were small."

Addison turns her head away, wanting to give them privacy but too embarrassed to leave. It's awkward. Dying is awkward: this ugly fact she's mostly spared as a doctor. Mutely, she watches Naomi comfort her daughter. In a way Addison's always been an intruder into this family. She's not the wife. She's borne none of his children. There's no word for what she is.

"You really didn't notice anything?" Naomi asks one night. They're eating takeout in the family room - no hospital fare here, this is supposed to be a comfortable space. Like dying at home, except - not.

Addison swallows, takes her time chewing rubbery noodles. They're dry and tasteless. She doesn't answer.

"Did he seem different?" Naomi asks and Addison takes a long draw of water.

What answer would satisfy Naomi? Could any answer satisfy herself? _Yes, _she could say. _I noticed that he was kind of an asshole sometimes. More than sometimes. But I'm sometimes an asshole too so I didn't say anything and I didn't do anything. _

"Not really different," she mumbles.

_He stood there just watching me while I was sick. He stopped touching me. I still think something happened between the two of you but he wouldn't admit it. Yelled when I brought it up. Raged. And then he was indifferent and, well, if you were me would you think that meant something was wrong? Or just an inevitability? _

Naomi reaches for her hand and Addison lets her. Her knuckles are vaguely chapped. So much hand washing. Like the NICU, except it's the end of life instead of the beginning.

He gets weaker. He stops responding to her at all. He doesn't know what's happening to him, and the nurses tell them to be grateful for that.

Addison decides, as she holds his hand - big, warm, unresponsive - that she would want to know. She doesn't like when things slip away. She would want the chance to hang on.

She admits it to herself late one night, lights dimmed in the room that smells faintly of sandalwood - a scent he's always liked - and the cocoa butter they rub into his skin: she didn't really want to marry him. And maybe she wouldn't have. But she's never been good at dodging bullets; they just lodge somewhere else and fester.

Pete's there when it happens. She finds out later that they'd been taking it in turns to sit with her, Cooper and Pete, starting doing so after the measurement of time turns from weeks to days.

She's sitting on the soft chair by his bed, holding his hand, not talking to him because there's nothing left to say, when the life slips out of him like water.

She expected it and knew it was coming and was prepared but somehow all that flies out of the window and she grasps at him, tries to pull back whatever it is that disappeared when he drew his last breath. Pete gathers her away from him, holds her when the doctors come in, and she scratches at him, disliking her own grief, embarrassed at her display. She fights hard and he contains her in familiar arms against the hard expanse of his chest. Naomi comes in and hugs her and the guilt and shame pour out of her like tears into the other woman's hair.

It starts again now that it is over, the end of a life just the beginning of the work it takes to go on.


	2. AFTER

**II. After**

They bury him in Pennsylvania on his family's plot. Addison is wrapped in wool and a soft looping scarf - it's nearly fall, the days getting shorter - the heels of her leather boots sinking into the ground. Naomi stands next to her, shoulders rigid, Maya tucked protectively under her arm.

Amelia and Derek are both there, huddled closer than Addison has seen them stand in years. Funerals do funny things to people.

Addison stands alone, extracting her arm gently from Amelia's every time the other woman reaches out. She stares at the ground and tries to ignore the empty rectangle of undisturbed earth next to his.

She knows it's for Naomi.

There's no resting place earmarked for her, of course, no word for what she was. Maya cries and Naomi holds onto her and Olivia; three generations of grief entangled as only family can be. They let the baby down and she takes a toddler-sized handful of earth; Maya helps her throw it on top of the coffin.

It's a funeral: they're all the same, the differences too painful to analyze.

"I'm sorry," Derek says to her at the airport, before he leaves. "I'm so sorry."

She just blinks at him. She'd almost forgotten they were taking different flights. They'll only see each other for tragedy now: the people Derek can save and the people he can't. He's not a god. Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the airport he looks older, more tired than she remembers. A web of lines have sprouted at the creases by his eyes and mouth. There's more grey than black in the hair she used to clench in her fists.

"Addie." He touches her shoulder.

"Thank you for coming," she says woodenly. She doesn't even need a box for him anymore. As he walks toward his gate - his flight leaves first - he's already tiny.

Charlotte approaches her on her first day back at work. "This is a bit awkward," she begins and Addison prepares herself with some annoyance for another chorus of the inarticulate sympathy that's been thrown at her all day.

This is something different. She has a sheaf of papers, a story, and a small glass vial.

"He knew how much you wanted a baby. He wanted to do this for you."

Addison shakes her head. "No, he - he wasn't lucid, Charlotte."

"At times he was," she counters simply. "At the beginning. There were lawyers involved, Addison. I can assure you everything was done according to protocol."

She steps back, burning heat behind her eyes. The edges of Charlotte are shimmery, like she's not real.

"I don't want-"

"It's yours, to do with what you want. We can hold onto it for you. It's here, whenever you want it."

There are guidebooks for grief, some better than others, but none for this. This is new. This is crazy, but then so is her life.

She considers it. She actually considers it, lying on one side of the big bed they used to share, naked - the way he preferred for her to sleep - her hand drifting unconsciously over her stomach, across her hips. She could hire someone. Extract what eggs she has left and mix herself a baby in a lab. Or find a surrogate. She lets her mind wander, pretends this is normal.

The vial is preserved at the practice. "There's no rush," Charlotte said. So she doesn't rush.

She waits a year.

There's something about a year: it's a measurable, careful amount of time. Grief likes time, likes the tangible spans of it and the neat way it packages pain.

A month: that's how long she and Naomi wait to clean out his house.

Three months: that's how long it takes to stop sleeping on her side of the bed.

At seven months, she has sex again. Kevin. He calls her when he hears, and that's all it takes. She cries the whole time, begging him not to stop, knowing how much she needs it. Comfort, that's all it is. It doesn't happen again, but he calls her almost every week, takes her to coffee, tells her he's around if she needs him. He's a good guy, better than she realized.

At nine months, she considers erasing his name from her phone, but changes her mind. Naomi confesses, after a few glasses of wine, that she hasn't done that either.

Eleven months: she agrees to a blind date, then cancels at the last minute. She calls Kevin instead and they sit on her balcony and look out at the water. It's always more comfortable for her with men she's already slept with. No mystery, no tension. He takes her hand in a friendly gesture and tells her it's okay to still miss him. He's a cop, he's done his share of grief counseling. She just nods, like it helps.

And then it's a year. She retrieves the vial from the practice and takes it home.

She walks on the beach, alone, in shorts and a loose, flapping tee shirt. His shirt. She's awash in guilt no one understands, because she didn't even like him that much at the end and maybe she could have saved him if she'd figured out why he was acting that way and because ultimately he didn't make her happy. Not when he was alive. Not now. Not with this last benevolent gesture that somehow encapsulates all that was wrong with their relationship: how little he understood what she truly wanted from him. He always thought he could map her life better than she could, that he knew her better than she knew herself. She wanted to swoon and let him but she never quite could and now she'll never get to. Never have to.

What kind of person is relieved to lose someone they love?

The sea is mild today, a poor reflection for the turmoil that rocks her. She shades her eyes from the low-hanging sun, feeling dark and ugly, undeserving of life. She wades in up to her knees. Waves slosh around her legs, smelling of salt and tickling her with seaweed. The horizon is far and close, all at once. She sinks down, slowly, until the water is at her shoulders, then licking at her chin. Then the tips of her ears. She's always been comfortable in water. She lets her knees bend more, until her lips are moist, then wet.

She uncaps the vial and tips its contents into the ocean. Then she ducks fully underwater, tastes him one final time, apologizes for all she couldn't say and all she can't help feeling and, when her lungs are full to bursting and her head is starting to fizzle and pop with the pressure she stands up, draws a desperate mouthful of air and is free.

She looks in the direction of his house - a family lives there now - as she tromps through the sand toward her own. Because she can be more than one thing at once; she contains multitudes, as it is said: she's the widow and the ex, she's everything and nothing, she's grieving and she's relieved. In the end she never knew him, because he wasn't him. Sometimes she'll miss him. Even when she stops thinking about him, eventually, a part of her will still miss him. She accepts this as she accepts the only piece of him she had left floating away with the movement of the ocean.

_I'm sorry,_ she says again, and because she wants it to be true she adds: _good-bye._

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><p><strong>Reviews are warmly welcomed.<strong>


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